


off the edges of the map

by nocturneFlowers



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Angst, Bahamut is a jerk but you won't see him here, Blind!Ignis, Dreams, Goddammit Ardyn, I'm so sorry, M/M, Royal Arms, Songfic, Spoilers, The Promnis Is Implied, Trail of Blood, the crystal, with a dash of Trying To Wake Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:35:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23616877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nocturneFlowers/pseuds/nocturneFlowers
Summary: In which the Crystal takes more than it gives, and waking up costs more than falling asleep in the first place.
Relationships: Ardyn Izunia & Noctis Lucis Caelum, Gladiolus Amicitia & Noctis Lucis Caelum, Lunafreya Nox Fleuret & Noctis Lucis Caelum, Noctis Lucis Caelum & Ignis Scientia, Noctis Lucis Caelum & Regis Lucis Caelum, Noctis Lucis Caelum & Somnus Lucis Caelum, Prompto Argentum/Noctis Lucis Caelum
Kudos: 11
Collections: Bad Things Happen Bingo





	off the edges of the map

There once was a prince whose life was beholden by the gods, and by their grace they blessed him in blood.

One day, his destiny fell into his hands, and he was met by fate at death's door, whereupon the gods' hands led him towards a doorway of old.

And as he screamed and thrashed, he slowly fell into a sleep deeper even than death.

_Let me die, let me drown, lay my bones in the ground_  
_I will still come around when the time for sleep is through_

  
Noctis stands at a precipice, and below him lies an abyss, cold and unyielding, yet welcoming and tempting. He remembers, then, as he stares into the void, a saying he had heard once before:

"Fear not the heights, instead fear the fall."

He believes the opposite then, for the fall looks far sweeter than the edge.

Everything is scarier from afar.

_Over hill, over dale, through the valley and vale_  
_Do not weep, do not wail, I am coming home to you_

  
His shadow smiles back at him, and he wonders if perhaps he had fallen asleep and is dreaming.

Humans are strange, he muses, as the shadow grins back with sharpened shiny teeth. (Something strikes him as odd then - Since when had he not counted himself as human?)

He looks away and up, and meets eyes with a stranger, blonde and lithe, fully in white, with plaited hair and a severe stare, her hands wrapped around a trident shining gold.

She is familiar. She is strange.

She looks away, and something fades.

_Every tomb, every sea, spit the bones from your teeth_  
_Let the ransomed be free as the revel meets the day_

He walks on, through valleys and seas, through darkness and light, through elsewhere and everywhere. His feet make no noise as he tramples the leaves strewn about the unmarked roads, and his legs do not ache with strain as he walks on through the bitter rain.

Instead, all he feels is loss, all the way down to his bones, unyielding and ever present. A void in his soul that was once was filled and could no longer be, growing ever bigger with every step and every nagging thought that called to him from somewhere deep below. It is strange, then, that this feeling should weigh little on his shoulders despite its significance.

Strange, he muses, the ways one got used to suffering. (Again, he is at a loss: For when has he ever thought such things?)

  
_Let the valleys awake, let them rattle and shake_  
_In the wind that remakes all that time has worn away_

  
He stops, once, for below a tree stood a stranger, his face scarred brutally, as if burnt and torn, and his unyielding stare cold yet serene.

The stranger looks at Noctis for a moment, and Noctis, like a deer before headlights, freezes and stares, fear adjacent to curiosity in his eyes.

The stranger looks away, and it is only then that Noctis realizes that he is blind - His eye is milky, with faint traces of the once bright green pupil, whilst the other is almost a mere white surface, as if blown out or burned away.

He continues to stare, and his eyes fall onto a ring of dark onyx and the dagger in the stranger's grip. When he looks back up, there is nothing there but a tree.

Somehow, he feels emptier than before.

_To and fro, I will not follow_  
_Where you go, I will not also_

As the skies change, so too does the ground, and soon he finds himself before a bridge of earth and stone, its handrails made of bleached white bone.

He hesitates, and the world around him berates him for it as a storm begins behind him, thunder and lightning striking true at the paths he once tread upon, and in his shock, he turns around, taking a step backward towards the bridge as he goes. 

A figure stands on the road, tall and pale, his dark robes stark against his deathly pallor. A sword hangs almost loosely in his grip, dark and familiar like the trident of the girl before.

The figure does not move.

Yet Noctis turns and runs, all the way onto the bridge of stone and bone and earth, and never once does he see how it changes with his every step, growing darker and shinier as he goes on.

Until he stops on the other side, whereupon walls of the same hue and material as the bridge stood tall and wide, and he turns around once more, and there on the bridge of bone and void stands a figure clad in dark robes, whose pallid skin and loosely held sword told of something buried and lost from long ago.

He looks, but the figure does not look back.

His back aches from a wound from years past, and it is then that he realizes he no longer knows how he got it.

_I will look for you as the sun rises higher_  
_When the dry bones dance with the timbrel and lyre_

Soon, he reaches a broken bridge whose expanse is littered with broken swords, with snapped metal pieces and hilts covered in blood, and he finds that he is tired. So, he sits upon the broken edge, where the wood falls away into splinters, where the river churns below as if calling for a stray traveler to enter its depths.

The world is silent despite the river's cries from below, and the bridge barely creaks when he sits upon its fragile and rickety-seeming surface.

Nary a moment passes before he hears movement, but when he turns, all he finds is another broken sword, one that shone faintly with the same dark metal as the blind man's ring and dagger, and the stranger's own blade. He reaches out, and his fingers brush against it.

The blade is sharp, yet when his fingers press against its edge, no blood wells up from the cut on his finger. Instead, the cut starts to close as he pulls his hand away.

He takes the blade with him when he leaves, and finds that is the only thing he can feel from there on out.

_There's a wind alive in the valley_  
_It will fill your lungs, if you'll have it_

  
  
Atop a valley stands a stranger in black, his tattooed arms bearing the image of an eagle's wings, his face and torso littered with scars more extensive than the eagle inked onto his skin. 

As Noctis walks through the path below it, he feels more than sees the stranger's stare.

When he finally reaches the point where the path diverged from the valley, he turns around and meets the stranger's gaze, his eyes flying towards the two blades clasped in his hands: A broadsword, dark and tall, and a katana, short and sharp.

The stranger looks away, and so does he.

When he takes his next step, it feels as if something has fallen away once more.

_Where I go, will you still follow?_  
_Will you leave your shaded hollow?_

  
A man stands in his path, wielding a blade of the same dark metal as the one in his hand.

Noctis' grip tightens on his blade, and the man finally looks up, his green eyes meeting Noctis' blue ones. The man, he finds, is familiar in every way.

Yet the blade is cold against his grip, and fear is flooding in his veins, and the question remains: Who is this stranger, that I should be so afraid of him?

When the man nods at him with a tired smile that echoes of memories of hallways and hands clasped in his, of laughter and the scent of water in the air, Noctis draws his blade.

The man seems to accept this, and bows.

"Walk tall, my son." A voice deep in his heart whispers, and his sword seems to grow colder.

  
_Will you greet the daylight looming,_  
_Learn to love without consuming?_

  
He reaches a lonely vale, where the skies seem lower and the light seems darker, whereupon a boy stands, his hand loosely gripping the dark metal crossbow in his grip, a gun pointed straight at Noctis in his other hand.

Noctis steps forward, the boy steps back with a shake of his head.

"Do you remember me? Any of us?" The boy asks, and Noctis doesn't answer. Something burns at the back of his mind, and his chest aches with the feeling of something lost and found.

"Do you know who I am?" He tries again, desperation lilting his voice to something close to hysteria, and Noctis shakes his head.

"Do you know who you are?" The boy says, fear dripping into his gaze, his gun still pointed at Noctis, one finger on its trigger. Noctis nods, and the boy's gun finally lowers. Relief flickers across the boy's face, and it feels as if something falls away.

"That's good...Do you want to go home?" The boy says again, something lighter in his tone, his blue blue eyes gazing into Noctis' with expectation tinged with a sadness deep enough to drown in.

"Where is that?" Noctis asks, his voice raspy and unfamiliar with disuse.

"Anywhere you want." The boy says, and Noctis feels like saying yes, but a thought strikes him then -

"Will you all be there?" He finds himself asking, and confusion floods into his mind as he wonders who he's talking about.

"Depends on you, bud." The boy says sadly, and there is something in his gaze that makes Noctis want to flinch away.

"Why?" He asks, and the boy seems sadder than ever.

"Because you finally have a choice." The boy whispers, and Noctis wonders what he means. A moment passes, and then the boy's gun is in his hand, pointed straight at the boy, his finger on the trigger, a dark ring shining on a finger.

The boy looks sadly at him.

Noctis' finger lies heavy on the trigger.

"When will you wake up?" He hears, and the weigh of everything bears down on his shoulders.

_It was a pale white horse_  
_With a crooked smile_  
_And I knew it was my time_

**"I don't remember ever falling asleep."**

The finger on the trigger twitches, the boy lowers his gaze. Noctis finds that he cannot breathe.

The boy looks up, disappointment littering his features, and something in Noctis breaks.

"I'm sorry." He whispers, and-

_It was the raging storm_  
_Of a foreign war_  
_And a face I'd seen before_

He finds another bridge, this one made fully of bone, smelling faintly of metal and decay. Walking over to it, he finds that the river raging below it is faintly pinkish, and suddenly he is leaning over the edge and vomiting black over the cold railing.

He rises, and wipes his mouth, and turns around at the sound of footsteps.

Behind him stands a man with red hair in a white robe, one hand on a wooden staff glowing the same faint gold as the trident now strapped to his back by a broadsword, large and black.

He draws his sword, whose hilt is freezing by now and still the only thing he can feel, and points it at the man, whose gaze lands on the swords strapped to his side.

"Why do you have that?" The man asks, waving a hand at one of the swords on his side, and Noctis carefully looks down, at the longsword hanging smack dab in between a katana and an elaborately decorated sword.

"This?" He asks, the man nods, and Noctis continues, "I don't know."

"I see." The man says, and turns around, starting to walk away.

Something feels off, and so he follows, his footsteps barely audible despite the daggers in his boots, the crossbow and swords sheated on his hips, and the broadsword and trident strapped to his back, and yet the man turns around.

"Where are you going?" Noctis finds himself asking, and the man smiles.

"Somewhere you should not follow, what of you?" His answer is vague, though lacking in the same substance that most answers like it held - the small grips that made even the maddest of lies bearable, viable, perhaps even believable.

"I don't know." Noctis answers, strangely honest despite his reservations.

The man nods sagely, then stops and turns around with one hand extended towards him in an almost friendly gesture. Noctis stares at it, and the man smiles and pulls it away.

"Really? I was under the assumption that you were looking for a way out."

"Out of what?"

"Here."

"Where's here?" Noctis asks, confused once more, and his shadow smiles gleefully from the periphery. 

"Do you not know where you are?" The man asks, tilting his head in almost mocking yet strangely sincere manner.

"No?" Noctis asks, and the man laughs with Noctis' shadow, his soft smile contrasted by the sharper one held by the other.

"Do you not intend to wake up?" The man asks, and Noctis narrows his eyes with suspicion.

"Wake up?" He mumbles in confusion, and the man's grin widens even more, closer now to the shadow's distorted smile.

A flash, as if triggered by his words, shot through the sky, less like lightning and more like a knife tearing through flesh. The sound echoes through the glen, and when Noctis turns to the stranger once more -

"Wake up **.** " The man's smile distorts, and darkness seems to seep out of the orifices of his face, dripping on his white robe and staining it an inky hue as it went.

"Wake up." He says again, and suddenly they are surrounded by the people Noctis had seen in his short journey, all of them bruised and beaten in a hundred different ways.

" **Wake up**." And the ground around him seems to pulse a hundred different colors, and he steps back with a scream as the ground below him cracks and falls.

"They're waiting for you." The man laughs, and Noctis finds himself alone once more, standing before and edge with one clear thought in his mind: To wake, he must jump.

And so, he falls.

And falls.

And falls.

_I will wait for this to end_  
_The back and forth; the battery_  
_For you at last to comprehend_  
_The kind of love of which I speak._

He greets three men at the end of his fall: A blind man with a sharp tongue and equally sharp blades, a beast of a man with a heart as heavy as his weapon, and a blonde gunslinger with a pain deep enough to drown in bleeding into his every move.

They know him, but he does not know them.

Somewhere, a voice calls to him, soft and slow, feared yet revered in a time long gone - The voice of a healer, of a man blessed by the gods only to fall to man, of an enemy whose laughter came from broken bones and stones torn asunder.

**"Wake up, young king, and face me."**

Something in him tells him not to, so he doesn't, for the strangers before him reek of blood and laughter, of memory and misery, of things lost and found, and when he calls for the Messenger's intervention and begs to be let back to a past long gone, the creature yips in agreement and he is brought before those three men once more, though younger and less weary.

The blonde walks over to him and slings an arm over his shoulder while laughing over a joke that Noctis has not heard, nor could comprehend, yet he does not mind. Instead, he laughs as well.

Voices call for him still, but he ignores them, for the fall tastes sweeter than the edge, and the landing is far enough away that one could pretend it did not exist.

_There as I flew_  
_Forgot all prayers of joining you._  
_I clutched my life_  
_And wished it kept._  
_My dearest love I'm not done yet_

And as long as he was falling, he was not dead.

As long as he was falling, he had **them**.

_How many years_  
_I know I'll bear_  
_I found something in the woods somewhere._

What the gods had never known about the prince was that he had learned to love despite the blood they had shed upon his soul.

His heart bled for those that fate did not wish to accommodate, and so the gods decided to steal.

They stole his heart of hearts, bit by bit, with every shadow he did not dare approach, and soon he was but a dream looking for a way out.

When he finally awoke, he saw a world he knew nothing of, and had only the memory of a mission to guide him, but when his feet hit the ground and his eyes met with the three strangers he had once known, something shattered.

And off he went, away from fate, away from time.

He gave up, and went to sleep. 

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was a prompt fill for "Trying To Wake Up" :)) 
> 
> If there are any corrections I need to deal with, then do let me know! Thanks for reading, and I hope you liked it <3
> 
> The songs were:  
> \- "Thus Always To Tyrants" by The Oh Hellos  
> \- "This Will End" by The Oh Hellos  
> \- "Pale White Horse" by The Oh Hellos  
> \- "In The Woods Somewhere" by Hozier
> 
> Additional songs that fit the mood of this fic:  
> \- "Song Of Storms" by Rozen  
> \- "A Sky Full of Song" by Florence + The Machine
> 
> The playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5vA2jHUGTFpRkdisqmV8tB?si=aAEOV5QVSLKrCY5fQAl8aQ


End file.
